No, not if you live in Beijing. Here it is, May 12, and it feels like March 12. Winter here is semi-permanent; you get a couple days of sandstorms to tell you spring is here, and then summer crashes down like a hammer (though it's late this year). Then you get a couple of impossibly short weeks of incredibly beautiful autumn weather, followed by a lethal frost on or around October 15 and the whole cycle starts over. And I do like it here. It's just that weather-wise, Beijing is not the world's most hospitable place. Any reason why they can't move the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square et. al. to Kunming, the way they moved the huge Dortmund steel plant?

Build the city, and the people and businesses will come. Or so the government hopes. Watch this video, Chongqing, City on Steroids, to see Chinese capitalism at work, for better or worse. The video is long and clearly intended for an audience that isn't very familiar with China (lots of China 101) but certainly well worth a look. Some of it is quite fascinating.

On top of the usual job stress, I have a pretty bad cold and this coming week will be a killer. So this blog will continue to have lots of peaks and valleys, from the flood of posts and comments from a few weeks ago to the slow trickle you're seeing now.

Via a link this great blogger left on Facebook, I found this very entertaining article. Is it based in any reality? I have no idea. My first instinct is to believe BOCOG and their PR people (my competitors) could never begin to have the PR acumen to choreograph such a delicate operation, but who knows? Definitely read it, especially if you are interested in the PR, Olympics and fairy tales.

The final section made me smile; the picture it paints is awfully rosy:

....China now has stakes in some of the great symbols of the western corporate world - such as Merrill Lynch and BP. China is starting to push back. Many young Chinese know that the likeliest outcome for the short-to-mid-term future is for Chinese companies and organisations to initiate a fresh and startling process of globalisation. More and more of the international agenda is now in China's hands to shape.

So as western journalists write the Olympic stories they had already planned months before, delivering them to an audience who are already suspecting them - and thus deprived of their element of surprise and shock - the Chinese people, like sensible people anywhere, will be relaxing, sitting back, looking at this event and seeing it for what it is - a mere three weeks of corporate frenzy, redeemed by a few sublime moments of sporting excitement, which will dissolve almost as soon as it is over. When it is, the Chinese people will be able to continue the remarkable journey they began many decades ago - and which, unlike the Olympics, really can and will change the world.

No doubt their journey has been remarkable, and it's already changed the world, painful as that is for some to acknowledge. Whether it's sustainable or ultimately built on sand no one can say. What I can say with authority is that the author is a little bit giddy about China's rise, which, as much as I want it to go on, is a lot more tenuous than you'd know from reading this article.

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As a lot of you know, I've been too busy and in too many airports and hotels to give this site any attention the past few weeks and my heart definitely isn't in it. I'm trying to get back into it, but it just can't be a high priority for me right now.

A good read, from someone who's been quite critical of China himself. Of course, all the candidates will bash China, as it makes an all-too-tempting target. Granted, there's plenty there to bash, but the casual branding of China as the root of all evil is as absurd as when Marxists say the same about the US. Thanks to Pomfret for fisking Clinton's sloppy charges.

It looks like my hosting company fixed the problem. Still, I am in the process of divorcing myself from Movable Type and hope to have a new and improved site for you in the very near future.

Even though you can comment again, I can't post for another day or two. All of your comments from last week that you thought were gone have been restored. See you soon.

I am out of town and I will try to get the problem fixed when I am back in China. First I need to find someone who can help me port the whole site off of MT and into a more user-friendly environment like Wordpress. For now the comments are hopelessly screwed up, and without comments this blog isn't very interesting. Any site designers out there?